The movement as representation

According to Rhodes, the Black Panthers spent a significant portion of their efforts on creating a culture, a collective subjectivity of their own, and disseminating their beliefs to the world through media representation and publicity. Among the efforts including carefully thought out speeches, deliberate terminologies such as calling the police “pigs,” creation of a ‘revolutionary culture’ and the image of a black panther as their logo, their choice of presenting themselves in uniforms of blue shirts, black pants, black leather jackets, black berets and opening displaying loaded shotguns strikes me particularly. It is striking to me because of its intentionally high level of theatricality, to the extent that an editorial derided them as “children acting out their fantasies in a world of make-believe” (73). Such theatricality, if not indeed a result of childish acts, should be treated more seriously as a deliberate strategy of the movement – the powerful image of the paramilitary attire and the shotguns, through its effects dissimilated and augmented by media representations, become a fundamental aspect of the movement itself. When we find the image hardly distinguishable from our conception of the Black Panthers, the image becomes no longer an expression or representation of the movement but rather a fundamental and central piece of the movement – the representation becomes the movement itself. For some reason I’m disturbed by Emory Douglas’s comment: ‘like being in a movement you’d seen on TV and now you could participate and share in that movement… to become part of that brought a sense of pride’ (68). What happens when a political movement becomes conceived in terms of TV representation? And what does it mean to desire to be part of that representation?